The ping
command is one of the most used tools for troubleshooting, testing, and diagnosing network connectivity issues.
Ping works by sending one or more ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) Echo Request packages to a specified destination IP on the network and waits for a reply. When the destination receives the package, it responds with an ICMP echo reply.
With the ping
command, you can determine whether a remote destination IP is active or inactive. You can also find the round-trip delay in communicating with the destination and check whether there is a packet loss.
ping
is part of the iputils
(or iputils-ping
) package, which is pre-installed on nearly all Linux distributions. It is also available on Windows, macOS, and FreeBSD.
How to Use the Ping Command
The syntax for the ping command is as follows:
ping [OPTIONS] DESTINATION
To better illustrate, how the ping command works let’s ping google.com
:
ping google.com
The output will look something like this:
PING google.com (172.217.22.206) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from muc11s01-in-f14.1e100.net (172.217.22.206): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=40.2 ms
64 bytes from muc11s01-in-f14.1e100.net (172.217.22.206): icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=41.8 ms
64 bytes from muc11s01-in-f14.1e100.net (172.217.22.206): icmp_seq=3 ttl=53 time=47.4 ms
64 bytes from muc11s01-in-f14.1e100.net (172.217.22.206): icmp_seq=4 ttl=53 time=41.4 ms
^C
--- google.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 7ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 40.163/42.700/47.408/2.790 ms
The ping
command resolves the domain name into an IP address and starts sending ICMP packages to the destination IP. If the destination IP is reachable it will respond back and the ping command prints a line that includes the following fields:
- The number of data bytes. The default is 56, which translates into 64 ICMP data bytes –
64 bytes
. - The IP address of the destination –
from muc11s01-in-f14.1e100.net (172.217.22.206)
. - The ICMP sequence number for each packet.
icmp_seq=1
. - The Time to Live. –
ttl=53
– How does TTL work? . - The ping time, measured in milliseconds which is the round trip time for the packet to reach the host, and the response to return to the sender. –
time=41.4 ms
.
By default, the interval between sending a new packet is one second.
The ping
command will continue to send ICMP packages to the Destination IP address until it receives an interrupt. To stop the command, just hit the Ctrl+C
key combination.
Once the command stops, it displays a statistic, including the percentage of packet loss. The packet loss means the data was dropped somewhere in the network, indicating an issue within the network. If there is a packet loss, you can use the traceroute
command to identify where the packet loss occurs.
If ping
does not return a reply, it means that the network communication is not established. When this happens, it doesn’t always mean that the destination IP is not active. Some hosts may have a firewall that is blocking the ICMP traffic or set to not respond to ping requests.
On success, the ping
command exits with code 0
. Otherwise, it will exit with code 1
or 2
. This can be useful when using the ping
utility in a shell script.
In the following sections, we’ll go over the most commonly used ping
command options.
Specify the Number of Packets
As already mentioned, by default, ping
will continue to send ICMP packages until it receives an interrupt signal. To specify the number of Echo Request packages to be sent after which ping will exit, use the -c
option followed by the number of the packages:
ping -c 1 DESTINATION
For example, to ping linuxtips.in
only one time you would use:
ping -c 1 linuxtips.in
Specify the Source Interface
The default behavior of the ping
command is to send ICMP packages via the default route. If you have multiple interfaces on your machine you can specify the source interface with the -I
option:
ping -I INTERFACE_NAME DESTINATION
The following command will ping linuxtips.in
using em2
as a source interface:
ping -I em2 linuxtips.in
Specify the Internet Protocol
When you run the ping
command, it will use either IPv4 or IPv6, depending on your machine DNS settings.
To force ping
to use IPv4, pass the -4
option, or use its alias ping4
:
ping -4 DESTINATION
For IPv6, pass the -6
option or use ping6
:
ping -6 DESTINATION